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Commercialised representations of children and babies have been normalised as content on social media platforms in the same way as child models and actors have in traditional media. This paper explores the impact of this workload on children in practice, evidencing a range of potential risks of harm which are not currently provided for in policy or practice. This paper synthesises approaches to parental digital sharing (sharenting) alongside child labour considerations in order to analyse this legal lacuna, which is not constituted within any privacy, child labour, or child online safety laws within the UK. It proposes that pre-existing legal frameworks cannot effectively address these risks, which extend beyond issues surrounding data protection and financial security, and include impacts on children’s identity, dignity, and psychological development. This paper suggests alternative contemporary approaches to policy and practice, which could provide new and enhanced safeguarding processes for children working in digital spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates on temporality and the social mobility trajectories of independent child migrants and working children, drawing on findings from research conducted in 2022 with young adults who participated in an earlier study in 2010 as children working in artisanal gold mining in Ghana. The findings show that national and global economic conditions, not childhood work, have shaped the participants’ (im)mobility experiences and trajectories over the past 12 years. Based on this longitudinal evidence, the paper challenges the widely held view that child labour in and of itself creates enduring adverse effects on children’s social mobility trajectories. It argues that this understanding reflects a simple cause-and-effect linear temporal logic, which fails to consider the enduring impact of structural factors on working children's trajectories. This understanding also incorrectly interprets social mobility trajectories that do not follow a linear, continuously upward trajectory as failures. The paper’s central thrust is that the temporality of progress and working children’s social and spatial trajectories should be understood as a complex, dynamic process rather than a fixed outcome predictable or predetermined by their participation in precarious labour at specific moments in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what youth movements do when their political participation in international organizations (IOs) is limited. Using the examples of young migrants in the European Union and transnationally organized working children, we argue that these actors resort to social media to make their arguments visible. While IOs have been striving to become more ‘open’ to affected (youth) actors, the two cases show that their access to policy debates remains limited. We argue that this is linked to the ambivalent representation of their subjectivity: young migrants and working children are considered to be particularly vulnerable and at the same time they are denied political agency. Given limited room for self-representation in IO debates, social media posts represent a practice of aesthetic reversal. Through Twitter (X) and Instagram posts these youth actors challenge the ways they are represented in and by IOs and claim political subjecthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child labour in cocoa production remains a major concern. Yet, an overall assessment of the role of cocoa production in child labour, comparing with other household livelihood activities, as well as a more nuanced view on the work that is done by children, is lacking. Using data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey 2017, we model the probability of children's work based on cocoa production and a set of other variables at child, parental, household and community level. We specify children's work in different ways to better interpret employment conditions, compare effects across gender and age of the child, and address potential bias by controlling for measurement error and using an instrumental variable estimation and a coefficient stability approach. We find that cocoa production increases the probability of working on the own farm but not exceeding allowable work time or in harmful conditions. The effects are similar for boys and girls but are much larger for older children. Other farm-household activities, especially food crop production and livestock ownership, are much more strongly associated with children's work, often under more harmful conditions. This implies that solely targeting the cocoa sector might run the risk to transpose child labour to other activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the effect of household poverty on child labour (CL) and explores how CL affects working children's health using an instrumental variable strategy. After correcting for endogeneity, we find that household poverty significantly contributes to the incidence of CL whilst increasing the working hour of children increases the likelihood that working children would sustain wounds/cuts, get skin diseases, or get burned by fire, signifying the adverse effect of CL on child health in Ghana. These findings are robust to different approaches to addressing endogeneity. The study recommends that while it is imperative to implement policies to reduce children's engagement in all hazardous forms of child work and to protect the health of working children, government policies that address poverty might also be necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]